Expert: Schools need to get online

Friday

Jan 25, 2013 at 12:01 AMJan 25, 2013 at 8:10 AM

More online learning could be coming to a school near you, based on a meeting yesterday of Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman's Education Commission, which is examining how to improve education in the city.

Bill Bush, The Columbus Dispatch

More online learning could be coming to a school near you, based on a meeting yesterday of Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman’s Education Commission, which is examining how to improve education in the city.

The group heard from online-education guru Tom Vander Ark, a director of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning and author of Getting Smart: How Digital Learning is Changing the World.

By 2015, every student in Columbus could have a take-home electronic device that could substitute for expensive textbooks and might include access to online instruction, Vander Ark said.

Some schools — perhaps about 5 percent of them — are failing so badly that they are beyond fixing and should simply close, to be replaced by a mix of new schools and online teaching, Vander Ark told commission members. Vander Ark included poorly performing charter schools among those that should be shuttered.

Colleges are training the teachers of tomorrow in generic “theory-based preparation” that is “ getting more and more irrelevant every year,” Vander Ark said.

Commission member Alex Fischer was receptive to Vander Ark’s message, saying he can imagine a move from expensive physical schools. He asked whether Columbus was “going to keep building the classrooms of yesterday” or embrace the future of technology. Fischer leads the Columbus Partnership, a group representing large local businesses and organizations.

Transitioning to online courses “clearly can cost a lot less than it does today,” Vander Ark said.

But not everyone on the commission was sold, some noting that many low-income children don’t have access to high-speed Internet service.

Rhonda Johnson, president of the Columbus teachers union, said new technology often doesn’t work and can hinder teachers.

“I think our teachers would embrace this, but many of them have given up,” Johnson said after the meeting.

The Rev. Otha Gilyard, of Shiloh Baptist Church, likened the proposal to the nation’s failed effort to move to the metric system in the 1970s — something that made sense on paper but never worked.

Gilyard said schools don’t just teach reading and math but build social skills. “We have to look at the total person.”

“They still will need to have socialization and not to be tied up in a house all day long playing games and just on the computer,” Gilyard said.

After the meeting, Fischer said he was not suggesting that online learning should replace schools; he was just trying to spark a provocative discussion. “Am I inspired by a lot of things I saw here? Absolutely.”